Because She Never Asked

I. The Journey of Rita Malú

1

Nobody imitated Sophie Calle better than Rita Malú. Rita liked being considered an artist, though she wasn’t entirely sure she was one. Rita carried out a series of experiments with truth, which someone had baptized as wall novels; they stood as modest tributes to her beloved Sophie Calle, that “narrative artist” par excellence, who was so close to her in age that only a year separated them. The physical resemblance between the two women was remarkable. If Rita applied her makeup carefully, their faces could be nearly identical, although they were the least alike in height. Rita Malú was a couple inches taller than Sophie Calle (it amused her to tell her friends that Sophie was “tall and worldly,” and she was just tall, not at all worldly). If only she were a little shorter, she would be the spitting image of Sophie Calle, who truly was, by the way, a world figure. So Rita’s height did represent a bump in the road to an almost absolute likeness. No one could dare say, though, that Rita Malú didn’t try to imitate her beloved Sophie Calle in every possible way. For instance, she styled her hair and clothes after Sophie Calle, and she moved to the Malakoff quarter of Paris to be closer to her, where she secretly spied on this woman whose every detail she copied so carefully. Being in the same neighborhood, she was able to keep better tabs on her.

Rita paid careful attention to even the slightest of Sophie Calle’s physical fluctuations. She knew where she bought her clothes and food, and every once in a while, she’d follow her into the subway, or trail along behind her in a cab, identifying the people Sophie met outside the Malakoff quarter to know what lovers, friends both male or female, husband, or family she had. Rita dreamed of the day when Sophie Calle would finally realize that she existed and do her the honor of attending one of her exhibitions, held every now and then at an art gallery on Rue de Marseille, a space just below the second-floor apartment where Rita was born.

Despite her move to the Malakoff quarter and the fact that she had a rather hermetic (or perhaps simply melancholic) temperament, Rita was esteemed on Rue de Marseille, and every once in a while the gallery showed her wall novels, a peculiar genre of art copied from Sophie Calle: real-life narratives of a novelistic bent told through images centered on the photographer herself and hung on gallery walls.

Rita’s relationship with men had always been strange and disconcerting. Her father, a secret millionaire of Mexican origin, died when she was twenty years old and left her a small fortune. Neither she nor anyone else had known he was salting money away for his only daughter. Everyone on Rue de Marseille imagined that soon she’d find herself a boyfriend. She was an attractive girl, after all, if slightly lumbering. She seemed a little uncomfortable in her body, considering herself overly tall, especially when compared with Sophie Calle. As a result, she tended to slouch, trying to adjust her height to something closer to that of her beloved artist. Slouching was a silly thing to do though, and in fact eventually it became detrimental. Honestly, how ridiculous to create such a problem out of being tall.

Rita could be seen talking to the young people in the neighborhood, slouching something dreadful, but she began receding further into herself and her once-secret (now conspicuous) adoration of Sophie Calle. The whole neighborhood loved Rita, and she loved the whole neighborhood and no one in particular. Yet slowly but surely, she grew more aloof and ever more quiet. She overcame her reticence only on certain occasions when she was at home alone or with some suitor. Then she’d whisper in a slightly urbane, well-mannered fashion: “What a bore,” before returning to her melancholy state.

The day Rita turned thirty rolled around almost without her noticing, and she realized that she had become the best Sophie Calle imitator in the world. Her devotion had started early on. One day, completely by coincidence, she had come across the first newspaper article ever to mention Sophie Calle. She was immediately enthralled, certainly more than anyone else was. She took note of how much they resembled each other and was captivated by the strange work of this artist who had been born in Paris, just like her, and Rita made up her mind right then and there to begin imitating her, and perhaps in this humble way, to also fill the void in her own life.

By the time she turned thirty-five, Rita had secretly become the very picture of Sophie Calle. Rita hadn’t found a boyfriend, and had rejected all her suitors. The day she turned forty, she could be seen in her living room next to a large bouquet of flowers. “Look,” she said with an expression of utter chagrin, “I still have suitors.” A few months later, she moved out of her place on Rue de Marseille, returning only to exhibit her wall novels. She had three more shows, and the last was a series of photographs telling the story of a woman holding a camera and trailing a series of strangers, unnoticed by them. Turning down one suitor after another, Rita could be heard saying, “What a bore,” over and over again.

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2

One day, Rita Malú decided to ring in the New Year 2006 with a few touch-ups to her life. Not because it was the beginning of the year (when people usually make grand resolutions to change their lives completely), but because she simply couldn’t go on, no, she just couldn’t bear it any longer; over the past few months she’d become so bored of her home in the Malakoff quarter that she was starting to hate it.

“I hate this domicile,” she wrote that morning in red letters in the notebook where she jotted down her moods. The very word domicile seemed horrific to her. The first thing she did to change her life was to become a private detective and decorate part of her home to look exactly like Sam Spade’s office in The Maltese Falcon. Working from movie stills, a few men spent a couple of days installing a glass door like the one in Huston’s film, but with Rita’s name etched on it instead of Sam Spade’s. She arranged the rest of the office on her own, positioning cluttered papers and files just so; she even bought a fan that was utterly useless for that time of year. Next, she placed a classified ad in all the city newspapers: “We can find the most carefully hidden person on the planet. Rita Spade. Private Investigator.”

The ad with the office phone number ran for two weeks, but no one called. Nobody requested her services. Eventually, she got sick of waiting around, and thought that if nothing showed up, at least she could use the material for a new Rue de Marseille wall novel. She decided to take action. She combed her hair back with pomade, dressed up like a man with a gold-toothed grin, and took four passport photos. She proceeded to show them around in a variety of bars and hotels along Montparnasse, asking if anyone had seen this man in the vicinity, asking questions, really, about her own self.

“Ever seen this guy?” she asked.

No one knew a thing about him. They cracked a few jokes. “Must be a real son of a bitch,” they told her at the Select. She’d pull out a card with her office address and telephone number before taking off and ask them to call her if they saw the lug hanging around. “What was his crime?” one of the waiters at the Blue asked. Rita shrugged her shoulders, saying, “Don’t know, all I know is that I was hired to look for him.” “Think you’ll find him?” the waiter asked. Rita made things up as she went along: “I think it’ll be easy. I’ll find him at home.” She sped off, back to the hated domicile, as soon as she saw that the waiter was suitably confused. The day had been worth it after all, if only for the moronic look on that man’s face.

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3

The phone rang one day, when she least expected it. A woman told Rita Malú that she had a proposition to make, but that she couldn’t talk over the phone. At last, a client! Life took on a whole new meaning. They arranged to meet at the dick’s office in two hours. The woman, who was very thin, almost thirty, and soberly dressed, had a pale, sad face: her name was Dora. The ad caught her eye, she said—“so original,” she emphasized, because it advertised Rita’s knack for finding someone in hiding. It fit the profile of the investigator she required. She needed Rita to find the whereabouts of her ex-husband, a famous young writer. He’d been at an undisclosed location for months and had failed to send her the hefty alimony checks he owed her. The writer had published his fifth novel not long ago, in which he staged his own disappearance. And he had now, as it were, vanished into the very text itself. He hadn’t been seen since the book was released. Dora had heard rumors that he found haven on Pico Island in the Azores. Lost in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the island was basically one colossal volcano. Dora’s ex-husband had already written about the island in one of his earlier novels, so he was very familiar with the place, and surely that’s where he was hiding out, but it was too remote for her to track him down herself. She was sure that the agency — she would pay spectacularly well — could investigate and discover his whereabouts, whether on Pico Island or anywhere else. “Just find him,” she said, “and get him to do me the goddamn favor of paying the alimony.”

It took Rita Malú all of five minutes to be rid of any doubt about what was going on. The missing writer did exist, his name was Jean Turner, Rita had heard about him once. Up to that point everything made sense. But clearly this first client of hers, this woman, was batty. Dora must have read one of Turner’s books, fallen in love with it, and as a result, she now alleged and wanted to believe that the main character of the book (the young writer) was her ex-husband.

Rita felt a pang of fear when she realized she was dealing with a very unstable individual. It took a considerable effort to finally get rid of the client, and she swore to dismantle the office the very next day. Game over. This road could only lead to more deranged clients. She went to bed and dreamt about a little red house, a house she adored, atop a small promontory. Unable to resist its spell, she knocked at the door of the little house until finally an old man answered. Just as she opened her mouth to tell him something, she woke up. But the red house persisted in her memory for days to come; both the house and the old man. Maybe, she thought, they really exist somewhere.

The visit of the strange, lunatic client had unsettled her for some reason. So the next day she went out and bought the novel by this young writer, this Jean Turner, whom that poor woman thought was her ex-husband. The back-cover copy established that Turner did indeed narrate his own disappearance in the book, but hours later Rita would also discover that the author had only disappeared in the pages of the book. In real life, he’d simply retired to Pico Island and hadn’t tried to hide the fact from anyone.

What to make of it all? Rita stared at Turner’s photo on the back cover: a young man of thirty, very tall, extremely thin, with bat ears, a narrow face, and a bushy chestnut-colored beard; he wore a moth-eaten coat, a baseball cap, and a navy-blue scarf. He was rather unpleasant looking. But she had bought the book and his four earlier ones, too. After all, and without even realizing it, she had been relieved by poor Turner of the boredom of her daily life. Later that same afternoon, she came across repeated references of the Azores in his fourth book, where he mentioned Peter’s Bar a number of times, in the town of Horta on Faial Island, the one just beside Pico.

Rita stuck to her decision to shut down the sterile detective office and forego her less-than-exciting rounds of Montparnasse bars, where she’d been asking questions about her own self. It now occurred to her that it was time to travel. Why not escape the monotony? Why not travel to the Azores to find a man like, say, Turner? She’d never pursued a man before. And a natural outcome of never having pursued a man could be traveling to the Azores to find a vulgar, ugly fellow of no concern to her whatsoever. The man was insignificant, this writer with a bushy, chestnut-colored beard. Why not spend some time, perhaps begin an adventure like Lewis Carroll’s Alice (whom she’d so loved in adolescence), and wander around aimlessly to and fro, not worrying about whatever took her from one place to another?

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4

Rita arrived in Lisbon three days later, ready to skip over to the Azores. She carried a small, abridged version of Sophie Calle’s work in her suitcase (a sort of Marcel Duchampian boite-en-valise), along with a book by Simone Weil. Rita had been disconcerted by Weil’s contempt for the imaginative arts, which Weil considered mere tricks to camouflage the immense void of our mortality.

She decided to see a bit of Lisbon first and postpone her connecting flight to Faial Island in the Azores until the next day. The day was cold, almost wintry. And Rita, without quite knowing why — almost as if she were receiving some kind of command, as if someone behind her, thinking she wasn’t going anywhere, had ordered her to go somewhere — journeyed to that frightening place near Lisbon, Boca do Inferno. Only three kilometers from Cascais, it’s a ghastly spot in the winter. The tide comes in hard, filling the coves and rock crevices, howling dreadfully, and blowing crests of spray high on stormy days.

Boca do Inferno is the spot where the people of Lisbon traditionally commit suicide. Oddly, or at least contrary to the habitual practice of asking God for traveling mercies, Rita commended herself to the ghost of the magician and Satanist Aleister Crowley, who traveled to Lisbon in 1930 to meet Fernando Pessoa. He faked his own disappearance at Boca do Inferno, leaving a suicide note in his gold cigarette case. The message spread across the globe, since the Satanist was a very famous man, and also because his accomplice took it upon himself to notify Lisbon’s Diário de Notícias.

At Boca do Inferno, Rita imitated the diabolical Crowley and left her own note in a cigarette case she’d bought on Rua dos Douradores, announcing her suicide to the world and taking leave of Sophie Calle with words of love, written in Portuguese.

A few minutes later, unexpectedly, she felt as though, for this rather gratuitous act of writing the note, she was being thanked for being such a good sport; she was being rewarded by being taken spiritually very far, away from herself. And what was even stranger: she had the impression, for what seemed the eternity of a few seconds, that she had actually turned into the real Sophie Calle.

She felt herself shrinking a few centimeters.

So she wrote another suicide note, substituting it for the previous one in the cigarette case. The message said exactly the same thing. (Nao posso viver sem ti. A outra Boca do Inferno apañar-me-á—nao sera tao quente como a tua; I cannot live without you. The other Boca do Infierno will receive me — it will not be as hot as yours!) Only this time it was signed by Sophie Calle.

Then she snapped to and left Boca do Inferno, slouching visibly, as if her suitcase weighed heavily. There is a goal but no path: what we call a path is but a series of hesitations, she thought, in order just to think.

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5

Two days later, Rita Malú arrived on Faial, the island next to Pico, her resolve strengthened by the fact that she had never pursued a man before and by her idea that what she was doing was merely a variation on the theme of not pursuing someone. In other words, she was traveling to the Azores to find some ugly, vulgar fellow who was really of no concern to her anyway.

Out in the middle of the Atlantic, a long distance from everything, both Europe and America, the islands seemed, at first, the very essence of “far away.” Distance was part of their allure, perhaps. In any case, the place was ideal for being far from the madding crowd. Her first sunset there was indolent and very slow. A beautiful, bloody twilight. She scrutinized it from the balcony of her room at the Hostal Santa Cruz on Faial, looking out at mysterious Pico Island in front of her.

Pico Island is a volcanic cone that juts abruptly out of the ocean; a precipitous mountain perched atop the sea. No more than three small coastal towns nestle along the foot of the mountain: Madalena, Sao Roque, and Lajes, the latter with its small whaling museum. Contemplating the volcano’s hazy silhouette surreptitiously from Faial was all it took for her to get a sense of the island’s strange and disturbing nature. And it was even stranger in the wintertime, as now. The closer one got to the island, the more it commanded respect, as if one were being called to the very gates of things past.

Café Sport on Faial Island, also known as Peter’s Bar, was an extraordinary place: something between a tavern, a meeting hall, an information bureau, and a post office. The old whalers hung out there, as did people from ships on their way across the Atlantic or on other long-distance journeys. There was a wood-framed bulletin board with all sorts of notes stuck to it: telegrams, letters, made-up memories, drawings of boats inscribed with sentences by people who seemed shipwrecked from their own lives.

The mythical figure, José Azevedo, whom the English baptized with the nickname Peter during World War II, had died a few weeks before Rita Malú arrived at Café Sport. Now his son José Henrique Azevedo ran the bar that was founded a century earlier to serve drinks to foreigners, the Atlantic’s lonesome sailors, and the whalers. The weather along the channel between Pico and Faial Islands was stormy, so the ferries weren’t running that day. Rita wasn’t in any hurry to get to Pico and find the writer with the bushy chestnut beard. What could she possibly say to the man when she located him? She probably wouldn’t dare say anything at all.

So she spent two full days waiting for the weather to settle, conversing with the old whalers at Café Sport, taking their photos as they told passionate tales of the days when hunting cetaceans was permitted in the Azores.

In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville wrote that the bravest whalers in the world came from the Azores. With that in mind, Rita left the bar each day feeling closer to the heirs of those titans, men who told her old sea tales, which she jotted down in her notebook. Registering these stories about the ancient whalers’ lost world made her feel as though she were living happy moments in her life; perhaps this was the closest she’d ever felt — more even than at Boca do Inferno — to Sophie Calle, that person she always discreetly imitated.

At night, carefully writing out some of the yarns she had recorded during the day, she would imagine the show she’d put together at Rue de Marseille when she got back to Paris, she might even dare to invite Sophie Calle, to show her how her most devoted copycat was now able to impersonate her so truly. Rita would create a staggering wall novel with all these old whalers on Faial. The entire neighborhood would see what she was capable of.

She felt nearly perfect. After all, she was hearing more than just whale-hunting tales. She’d also been made privy to spy stories from World War II, when Faial was a strategic spot and a supply point for Allied ships and American seaplanes, the famous clippers that anchored in Horta Bay in front of Café Sport.

Two days after her arrival in Faial, Rita Malú decided to play another one of her private jokes. She hung an anonymous message on Café Sport’s bulletin board, careful that nobody saw her do it: “I’m shipwrecked from my own life, here to reject my last suitor.” Rita was sure that nobody would suspect her of leaving the note, this ordinary journalist who was just hanging around, worried (although they couldn’t possibly imagine as much), that the bad weather in the channel would abate, obliging her to board the Pico Island ferry to find the suitor she must reject; nobody was asking her to do it (really nobody had asked her to do anything), yet she sensed that somehow this rejection would allow her to say goodbye, once and for all, to the ghost of love.

“Love? I believe in it, but it’s not for me. I’ve never been and never will be in love,” Rita wrote on a small piece of paper she posted a few hours later, again, when no one was watching, in the spot where the love missives hung on Café Sport’s charming wooden bulletin board.

Good weather finally allowed the ferry across to Pico the next day. A few old whalers, now her fastidious suitors, had offered to escort her, but Rita found a way to avoid the companionship of so many impertinent men. She pulled a wedding photo out of her luggage to get them to back off, a picture she carried around if she ever needed to shoo any horseflies away. It was really another woman: Sophie Calle playing the part of a bride at her false wedding, though it was hard to tell the difference. Everyone took it to be Rita on her wedding day, since she looked so much like the artist she impersonated.

“What a bore,” she said, taking leave of the men as she boarded the ferry that was heading for Pico Island and its spectacular volcano, the tallest mountain in Portugal. Very few people were on board, she counted eight in all, each one carrying a wicker basket or woven bag; there wasn’t a single tourist among them. Rita was gripped by a sense of estrangement that intensified the closer she got to the island. Luckily, she knew what she had to do when she got there. She had read in an episode of Jean Turner’s penultimate novel that there were two cab drivers on the island: a young one and an old one. She knew not to waste a second over determining which one to hire; it had to be the older one, since the younger driver, according to Turner, was reckless. Which is exactly what she did when she landed on Pico Island. She hadn’t bothered to look up the writer’s address from Faial, in fact, she hadn’t even pronounced his name once the entire trip. All she had to do was ask the older cab driver to take her to the town of Lajes, just like one of the characters in Turner’s novel. And just like that character, she would also say she wanted to visit the Whaling Museum. And she would wait until she was in the cab before asking the whereabouts of this tall, thin young man with the bushy beard, in whose world of fictitious reality she had been circulating for some days now.

The port village of Madalena was like a ghost town. The eight people disembarked from the ferry and disappeared within a few seconds of landing, vanishing into the town’s tiny labyrinth of streets. The town was deserted at that time of year, or at least during these hours of the day. And there they were, two taxis waiting for the ferry to arrive. It seemed as if they had already been notified of Rita’s presence on board from the port in Faial. She walked straight to the older cab driver, got into his car, and asked him to take her to the Whaling Museum in Lajes. The younger driver cursed, acting as though he had expected this to happen all along; perhaps the curses were insults also meant for Turner.

The road connecting Madalena with Lajes skirted the base of the volcano, a curvy, narrow route full of deep potholes that ran along a breakwater or seawall and looked out over a deep-blue, rebellious Atlantic. The road crossed through land that had once been covered in vineyards and the sumptuous houses of patricians (all fallen to ruin); now the land was rocky and melancholic, dotted with strange, solitary, minimalist houses scattered atop low, windswept hills.

Rita figured the time had come to inquire after Turner and asked the driver if he could take her to the house where the island’s writer lived. The driver didn’t understand Rita’s Portuguese very well and thought she was asking about a writing desk. “No store in Pico sells such things,” he said. This is exactly what happened in the novel of the writer she was looking for, and Rita couldn’t help but think how funny it was, how sublime even, this impression of living out what’s in the pages of a book, a book that had already been written.

As expected — they had already told her as much on Faial — the Whaling Museum in Lajes was closed. So her search for the hidden author was nearing its end. “What a bore,” she sighed, whispering to herself that Turner, too, was like a closed museum. A shipwreck of her own life, Rita Malú wanted to return to Peter’s Bar, where she had enjoyed impersonating Sophie Calle without anyone being the wiser. As far as Turner was concerned, she preferred not to see him. What for?

Before returning to the pier at Madalena, Rita decided to visit the church in Lajes and walk around for a while. Later, she invited the cab driver for a coffee in the town square, where he recounted the splendors of his youth on Pico Island, in a tone filled with melancholy. “Men are so boring,” she murmured. A little while later, they headed back to the pier.

As they drew nearer to Madalena, they came to a bend in the road. Rita spied a short trail leading to a small red house that was identical to the one in her dream a few days earlier. She asked the driver to stop and wasn’t surprised to see how the path wound briefly up to the small top of a tree-covered hill, exactly as in her dream. It came to rest in front of the red house, whose tiniest details she now remembered with sharp precision.

It felt as though she had always been there, ever since her dream about this house whose door had been opened to her by an old man. The closer she got to this tiny red house, the more she felt compelled to knock at its door, pulled by its peculiar attraction. So she did exactly that, she knocked. The old man from her dream opened the door to her once again, only this time he was a towering and extremely thin old man with bat ears, a narrow face, and a bushy white beard. His coat was moth-eaten. It was Turner all right, but fifty years older. Unlike in her dream, Rita was now able to talk to the old man, and it occurred to her to ask if the house was for sale. It was, but the old man cautioned her against buying it.

“A ghost haunts this house,” the old man explained.

There was a brief silence.

“What ghost?” she asked.

“You,” the old man said, and he softly closed the door.